Customize Your Designs In New Ways

Hello, my Silhouette friends! Today I want to show you a terrific new feature that became available with Silhouette Studio® version 4. It’s called Object on Path, and it’s pretty cool. Now you can take any shape on your page and drag it to another shape, and it will follow the curves and contours of that shape you’ve selected as your path!

It’s similar to Text to Path, but it works with shapes instead of text. For this project, we’ll add leaves to a circular path and add the finished design to a mirror candle base.

Step One: Create Design

In this first step, we need to create a path and choose a shape to drag to it. A path in this case simply means a literal path or line for the design to follow.

Draw a 3.75 in. circle (hold Shift while dragging to make it perfectly symmetrical). (Tip: You can find your Scale tool for exact dimensions either on the Quick Access Toolbar, or open the Transform Panel and go to the second tab that looks like a double-pointed diagonal arrow. Make sure to click on the lock icon so it resizes your circle proportionately.)

Open your shape and resize it. I chose a single leaf from Design ID #101022 and resized it to about 0.5 in. wide by 0.9 in. high.

Open the Replicate Panel (immediately below the Transform Panel) and click on the third tab for the Object on Path feature.

With the leaf selected, click “Show Grab Handle” and you’ll see that same symbol appear in the center of your leaf shape. (See image below.)

Hover your mouse pointer over that symbol, then when the four-pointed arrow appears you can click and drag that shape over to your circle path. (See image below.)

Your leaf will automatically replicate itself to fit that area, so you can leave it and be done, or fine tune a little more based on the following tips. (See image above.)

Drag the small circle that’s got a colored center and black outline to either eliminate shapes while spreading them farther apart, or to add more leaves while reducing the space between.

You can play with all the settings for angle and position in the Object on Path panel to see what they do. I won’t go over them all here.

“Release Copies,” located at the bottom of the panel, will make it so your design can no longer be edited on the path. Either way, the circle path will not cut, so releasing copies is not required.

Step Two: Assemble

You can now cut your circle of leaves from vinyl.

In the Send Panel, choose:

Material = “Vinyl, Glossy” (or whatever material you are using)

Action = “Cut”

Tool = whichever blade you are using

The leaves should be showing with bold red outlines, indicating those lines will cut. (See image below.)

Send it to cut, then weed away the excess.

Use a piece of transfer tape to lift the leaf design off of its backing.

Place the leaves onto the mirror candle base and rub with a scraper tool to get a good grip.

(Tip: To help align the leaves onto a small circular base like this, you can use your cutting mat’s grid and the grid on the transfer tape to help get it centered.)

Remove the transfer tape, and you’re done!

Don’t you love this feature for creating your own designs? Be sure to play with the settings and controls on the Object to Path panel because there’s so much more you can do!

Great idea, Teresa! You can actually add text to a path with its own characteristics appropriate for text, and no replication like this feature offers. Just double click on typed text and drag the four-pointed arrow to the path.